She’s trying to be nice. I need to remember that. I need to hold that thought in my head. She wants me to succeed. She wants to report back to Mr Oakham with,“Good news. I’ve managed to tame your brat son.”
“Everything.” Fine, fuck it. Honesty it is. “I’m struggling with everything. Motivation to come here. Motivation to get me through the day. I’ve been here for a week and I still have no idea what my official job title is. What my role will entail.”
Amy checks her paperwork. She flicks through a stack of notes and evidently doesn’t find what she’s searching for. “We will get back to you with that. What I can tell you is that you’re in band two for PAYE, which means you’re on thirty-five thousand pounds per annum. That’s usually a junior supervisory role, not an entry role, so it’ll be something a little more important than say . . . admin assistant.”
Even I can see the classism in that comment. Me, Orlando Oakham-Goodwin.
“It’s not the job title that’s bothering me. It’s just . . .” Okay, I started with honesty, let’s end this with honesty. “How am I supposed to muster enthusiasm for this job when I’m A, just winging it, B, don’t give a shit about it, and C, fucking loathe it?”
Amy flinches. I feel like I’ve won a tiny battle.
“Orlando, that’s really unfair. Your dad—”
“Do not drag that man into this. If it weren’t for my father, I’d probably just be a normal kid, with normal dreams and aspirations, and could just go ahead and have a normal career.”
She places the paperwork on the table. “Nobody’s stopping you from doing that.”
I open my mouth to argue. To tell her thatheis stopping me, that’s he’s always been controlling me, but it just hangs open. Is she right? Could I actually do something I enjoy?
Daddy Dearest had told me he would only fund my education if I studied at Cambridge or Oxford. I didn’t want to do that at either of those, so I stayed in Mudford and fucked my way through the past three years. But did I alwayshave more choice? Kids from poor backgrounds still go to uni. They fund themselves through loans and part-time jobs.
It hadn’t felt like an option back then.
In any case, if I’d actually gone to uni, what would I even have studied?
So perhaps, through inactivity, I’d made this bed for myself.
Fuck, and now it’s time to lie in it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and Amy flinches again. She’s so sensitive to the slightest change in emotion.
“It’s okay. Like I said, having a real job is an adjustment. If you want to stay here, though, we’re going to need you to put in one hundred and ten per cent.”
No way am I pointing out the total ick of her statement. I nod instead and hold my breath.
“I understand that this past week you’ve been catching up on training. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to come, but what I need to see from you is more desk time. We’ve got an app that reports back to your line manager—at the moment, that’s me—how many minutes per day you’re logged onto your computer. Orlando, last week you spent more time away from your desk than at it.”
“I was in the bathroom. I have IBS.”
“You need to figure out a way to manage it more effectively.”
My hackles are raised again. “I already manage it as best as I can. I avoid dairy and brassicas. I drink peppermint tea. I follow the FODMAPs diet. I take gut biome supplements and eat lots of oats. But stress and nerves will also trigger flare-ups, and this past week has been very stressful and nerve-racking for me. Would you rather I’d stayed at my desk and shat myself?”
She actually rolls her eyes, like I’m the one being unreasonable. She’s clearly not led a life of carrying around clean Calvin Kleins and a pocket-sized packet of wet wipes.
“We’ll move your workspace closer to the toilets,” she says. A silent “happy now?” hangs on the end of her sentence. “We need to be looking at getting your logged-in time up from forty-four per cent to at least eighty. Our company policy is ninety per cent, so there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
It’s unachievable. Physically unachievable. Unless I figure out how not to be stressed out by this hellhole. I nod.
“The other thing is that some of your colleagues have made statements about you being . . . somewhat hostile towards them.”
“Example?” I say and internally wince. I don’t point out that was probably Exhibit A.
“Well, I’m not going to name names, but we’ve had reports of you calling someone an ‘indolent pleb,’ and making fun of their shoes.”
I do not laugh. Though it takes a lot of concentrated focus not to. “Andy Whatshisname told me to photocopy this eight-hundred-page document, and when I said no because I was doing yet more manual handling training, he said I was bone-idle, called me a waste of company resources, and said I only got the job because of . . .” I use air quotes. “Fucking nepotism.”
In all fairness, he’s not wrong about any of it.
